Intel Debuts New Arrow Lake Chips for Gaming Laptops

After a turbulent 2024, Intel has a lot to do if it wants to regain its footing. The chipmaker’s first act of the new year is to unveil a raft of new chips designed for enterprise and gaming laptops with the all-new 200H and 200HX series. Additionally, Intel says it will make up for Arrow Lake’s initially disappointing gaming performance with its new Ultra 200S lineup.

Along with the new chips, Team Blue finally gave a glimpse at which PCs will get Intel’s latest hardware Lunar Lake SKUsthe business PCs that debuted at CES this week. The chipmaker is dropping a number of new laptop and desktop CPUs early this year, some of which are intended for enthusiast or business laptops.

Intel’s Lunar Lake has proven to be a powerful chipset in recent laptops. However, the story is a little different when comparing the company’s Arrow Lake desktop chipset, even with Intel’s previous 14th generation. We have seen this play in our area Origin Neuron 3500X PC review. That’s where the Intel Core Ultra 200HX and 200S series come into play. These are added to the existing lineup of laptop and desktop CPUs for improved graphics performance and Thunderbolt 5 support.

Laptops are still the first thing that comes to Intel’s mind; The 200H Arrow Lake series is supposed to lead the pack on laptops. There’s the Intel Core Ultra 5 235H, the Ultra 7 265H, and the top-end Ultra 9 285H. Both the Ultra 7 and Ultra 9 feature 16-core configurations, though the high-end chip includes six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and two LPE (low power efficiency) cores.

The new HX lineup of 200HX CPUs for the mobile workstation audience ranges from the Intel Core Ultra 5 245HX to the Ultra 9 285HX. The high-end chip uses eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. The chip also includes four Xe graphics cores, the same as the 200V series. These chips likely won’t perform exactly like their desktop counterparts, but they may have more in store for PCs with or without a discrete GPU for graphics or gaming.

We’ll need to know their stance on energy consumption. According to Intel, the high-performance 200H runs between 28W and 45W, while the 200HX will require 55W. I’ll be very interested to see how the 200H laptops can handle more intense tasks in a thin frame without overheating. As for the 200HX’s performance, we’ll want to compare the 285HX to other current champions like the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.

Lunar Lake clings to the place Thin and light laptopsalthough we’re finally seeing some remaining SKUs in more enterprise laptops. Intel pointed to the newly announced HP EliteBook This SKU includes four performance cores and four efficiency cores in an 8×8 core/thread configuration. It boosts the P-core frequency to 5.1GHz with 12MB cache. It’s one of those chips we’ve only seen in action from Intel itself, and so far, the high-end Ultra 9 288V chip hasn’t generated much buzz in the months since September 2024.

As expected, business laptops are supposed to include some security hardware. However, Intel promises that its chips will use their neural processing power to better detect threats.

As for the desktop, the big change will be the Intel Core Ultra 200S series, with the Ultra 9 285S supposed to be much better at performing AI than the company’s 14th generation. Whether or not any AI processing capabilities matter to you, at least we finally got to see what Intel had up its sleeve for non-light laptops. We’d love to see Intel regain its mojo, but we’ll have to see for ourselves whether these chips are a good first step.

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